Using the Specman Denali Interface to Verify a DDR4 Controller

CDNLive EMEA 2014 brought together a record number of Cadence technology users, developers, and industry experts to network, share best practices on critical design & verification issues, and discover new techniques for realizing advanced silicon, SoCs, and systems.

On the Tuesday, Mike Bartley, CEO and Founder of TVS presented an informative session that explored the call-back feature of the Specman Denali Interface (SNDI) to build a data checking mechanism to help a customer verify their DDR4 memory controller.

The Challenge

The traditional approach to build a data checker for complex memory interfaces generally involves capturing data for all the features of the design as per the protocol. This typically results in a lot of conditional code. To develop code that can capture the data at the memory interface is a tedious job and is prone to human mistakes. It is also difficult to maintain such a lengthy code. The ultimate aim of this project was to reduce and simplify the tedious, and time consuming, process of capturing the data on the memory interface to be used later for data checking.